During the time that Grum had a field trip with the adventurers Gabriel and Arabelle were busy working their way through interesting books. While Gabriel read through books about different countries and their history, Arabelle read through many training books, be it for the body or the mind.

Coincidentally both ended their categories around the same time, which caused them to follow right to the next category in their interests. Grum moved onto Wizardry while Arabelle moved on to Magic, which makes it a good time to give out a good explanation about what these are.

You see, these two fields both handle mana and started as one, but with time wizards started focusing more on the effect mana could have on things, while magicians focused the effect it had on energy and impalpable things. There are many things which both of these fields can do, like move things, but they do it in different ways.

While magicians will create or change the energy in a place or inside something, wizards will directly change the thing, be it its size or behavior, like making a carpet fly by making it “natural” for that specific carpet to be a certain amount above the floor.

Although both of these sciences do have their limits. Magic or Wizardry can’t create energy from anywhere, so they have to keep taking mana away from somewhere else, be it from a natural source, like some trees or from a stored version of mana, like in mana crystals.

These are usually sphere shaped, because it is important to have the maximum volume with the least surface and spheres are best for that. Meanwhile, to transport mana on large distances thin cables are used, again for efficiency’s sake.

But this wasn’t the only energy that was transported through cables, actually electricity came first. After many experiments it was found that over smaller distances transporting energy through mana was better, while longer ones, usually between cities or similar distances, was an improvement.

And through their learnings they were able to actually be more prepared for the world. Grum didn’t want them to learn any of this at least until he was sure that they’d become loyal to him, be it through their wills or through force, maybe even both. But through their discoveries and practice of what they learned they managed to uncover many things.

- Hey sis, look at me, I’m going to make this book disappear by making it look like part of the table! – I started explaining to her, trying to both teach her and make a show, making it more engaging so that it’d stay on her mind longer. - And then I need to make this pattern riiiight here.

- Ohhh those things look cool! Can I see them up close? – My sister asked, but when I didn’t answer, being concerned about making the drawing correct, she simply took it out of my hands, and I had to resign myself with what my memory could give me. I knew she could and most likely would spend hours looking at the different “cool” pictures.

- I think I got the right one. Can you let me check – I made a slight pause and continued with – oh great Arabelle? – trying to appeal to her emotions of greatness, but it didn’t work.

- Oh, I won’t give in this time. Show me and then I’ll give it to you. A fair deal; isn’t that what you taught me? – which was kind of what I told her. I had taught her to never give anything for free, but I forgot to mention favors and family which would make one act differently.

Augh I don’t know if she’s doing this because she’s smart or because she’s dumb. Why does she need to make everything complicated? And it isn’t like I can simply ask her “are you smart” because of two main reasons.

First of all, it’d be disrespectful and secondly, I read that smart people tend to doubt their intelligence, while dumb people call themselves smart, mainly because they haven’t gotten into contact smart so they believe they are smart, while more intelligent individuals know their stuff, but also know that there are some things they may not know, making them doubt their knowledge.

And so, I resigned myself and put mana out from my body into the paper where I drew the show… wait did I draw a show rune instead of a hide one? I realized this too late as I had already started putting in my own mana, which every living being produces naturally, into the paper and now it would keep sucking either until the spell was used or I ran out of mana, which would cause me to faint while my body produces some more mana until I have the necessary to make my body work, but I’d not only feel “tired and wanting to die from the pain” but also would “require for assistance for many weeks”, according to a book I had read a few hours ago.

I didn’t really want to experience that, so I started explaining to my sister how to make a hide spell so that the show one would be used on it, but before she drew the first half of the spell, with about 60% of my available mana used, the scroll stopped sucking on my mana and went over to the wall of the building and suddenly showed a window which wasn’t there.

On the other side of it there was some form of plant maze is what I could tell, but this meant that we somehow could escape this building! And Grum probably didn’t know that we did anything…hopefully. But the window slowly started fading and turning back into a wall. Was it an illusion made to trick us? Or maybe my magic was too weak, and the hiding spell used for this wall was too strong.

Perhaps a hide spell was used on this window-wall periodically, there were too many options and too little information. In the little time I had left, I tried looking over the hedge, but failed to do so. Personally, I didn’t believe that getting out of this building was going to be easy, there had to be something else behind that maze or maybe something with the maze, a trick of sorts. But I didn’t have the time to spend on that, if I could discover one of Grum’s secrets, I could probably find some more. Which was what I spent the next few days trying to uncover.

Meanwhile, inside a smaller mansion far away:

The group had been taken by surprise with the opening doors, but Elbian quickly settled everyone down and started explaining his plan. Given how the building had acted until that moment it was likely that either someone or something was controlling the mechanisms behind it and was observing them. He slowly eyed towards Grum’s double who simply nodded in agreement, trying to appear as wise as possible, but Grum knew it wasn’t long before it died, so he started withdrawing some of the mana he had put into it to save resources, because when a double, such as the one Grum had created and was using, broke it usually breaks some of the mana cables which cause the mana inside to erupt mostly uncontrollably and thus making it hard to catch back if the chance ever arises, because when doubles break it usually isn’t at the best of times.

Elbian had explained that they’d go through the most direct pathway to the center of the building, because that was, or at least he expected it to be, the most protected spot inside the enclosure, therefore important things would go there. He was quite right, but Grum had a plan which was already baking.

On each door was a sign of an elvish-looking writing which wasn’t distorted enough so that the group couldn’t read it and in one of them Grum had written “wizardry”. Because of the expectations of the group were overexaggerated, expecting an ancient civilization of sorts, the sign made it very tempting to go through and although the groups wizard wasn’t showing any signs of falling into the trap, Grum knew that he would at some point, or another go through that door.

What he didn’t expect is that it’d be so soon. The night that the group left the hall the wizard left during his guard duty to never return, which was noticed the day after with reactions ranging from madness and anger attacking the stupidity of their wizard to lamentation and sadness by the loss of another team member.

Grum also realized that with this death his dummy was entering the last moments of his life and he had already taken a substantial amount of mana from it, but he still could benefit from its existence. On its final night he put some sleep-inducing ingredients inside the food and during the middle of the night he woke up, went to the place where the magician was sleeping, took out a dagger and attacked the bulge which was under the covers.